During the years of this blog I have had an ongoing dialogue with a friend who wants to remain anonymous, and who I will call “Tomato Guy.” Many years ago when my oldest daughter left for college, she wrote me a letter addressed to “That Tomato Guy.” I do not raise nor do I like tomatoes. It was out of the blue and made no sense. It is appropriate for my friend, as it gives no hint of identity.

Tomato Guy wonders why I do this. I have asked him* to write here, making sure his identity is safe. He has no desire to write for limited consumption and just for the sake of writing.

TG wants to know the following: Since no one who reads Piece of Mind has a change of heart or mind, why bother?

It’s a good question. My first response was the standard one that I have used since 2006, that I like to write and argue. But that is not enough to sustain an effort that really only reinforces people in their ego-traps. We are all in a fog as we try to figure out the substance of reality.
Continue reading “Mindsets and the arrival of Tomato Guy” →

This is clipped from Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition by Griffin Fariello (1995). I often catch myself saying that the American public has been “dumbed down,” but know better. It’s always been like this. Public opinion is never anything more than a reflection of leaders and the media.

In 1954, Samuel Stouffer of Harvard University attempted to measure the breadth of [American] thought with a national poll. His finding revealed that 73 percent of the respondents would turn in their neighbors or acquaintances “whom they suspected of being Communists.” Seventy-seven percent of those polled wanted to strip admitted Communists of their citizenship, while 51 percent were in favor of imprisoning them.

Yet only 3 percent of Mr. Stouffer’s respondents had ever met an admitted Communist, even though 10 percent harbored suspicions about certain acquaintances. “He was always talking about world peace,” responded a housewife from Oregon. “I saw a map of Russia on the wall in his home,” said a locomotive engineer from Michigan. “I just knew. But I wouldn’t know how to say I knew'” said a Kansas farmer. “She had more money to spend and places to go than seems right,” reasoned a woman from Iowa. “He had a foreign camera and took so many pictures of the large New York bridges,” said another housewife from New York.
Continue reading “The new Red Scare” →

Phew! We made it! I didn’t want to go out of this world being wrong about everything*, and so waited to see if we survived 12/21/12 before writing this.

The mythologies of the northern hemisphere are based on sun worship. That much is obvious. I’m really curious, however, that the object of worship in Christianity, the “son” is the same sound as “sun.” In other languages we have sol, sonne, jus, soare, soliel … are those words also homophones for male offspring? Is ours just coincidence? The only cultural reference I’ve seen (my American educational background) was on an old Star Trek episode (the original series) where the boys came across a culture that worshiped the sun, and at the end found that the word was actually “son,” meaning the J-man had been there too. The guy travels!

Anyway, here’s the importance of Christmas and all other solstice celebrations: The sun is the giver of life. It brings warmth. As it goes away, things wither away. When it returns, things grow. In the vineyard it turns water into wine. It is the source of all life. It is kind, benevolent, caring and giving, harsh and indifferent, burning and destroying crops as well as nurturing their growth. In desert climates, the gods can be cruel. In climates of plenty, the gods are kind. The Egyptian Ra was benevolent, the Hebrew Yahweh a nasty muhfuh. It just depended on how the sun shone on any particular cultural dog’s ass.**

The sun slowly goes away, each day lower on the horizon. On the day of solstice, which we call December 21st, it reaches its farthest point. Then it appears to stay in one place for a few more days. On December 25th it begins its homeward journey.

On the third day it rises again. And so we celebrate. Hope springs anew. Life will go on.

I did want to make sure on this one, however. It was a close call! We all know that ancient cultures know more about the future than we do, so it was natural to assume that the Mayans had it figured out. Now they can take their place alongside Nostradamus. They are discredited.

Next up: Hebrews. The Israelis will have to stop stealing land, since their bible is made-up stories. After that, hopefully, Ayn Rand sets on the horizon, never to return.

Merry Christmas one and all!
__________
*Shush!
** It is also the reason that Jesus and Mary have halos around their heads … it is our ancient forebears’ way of saying “hint hint.”

I am in a room today with 71 other CPA’s, and man is it fun!

All professions have meetings like this, and none are fun. What is interesting is this: The speaker, a very smart and successful man with three offices and many employees, speaks of the Social Security program as if it is broke.

SS is in fact in good health, but of course would be doing better were we not in recession/depression.

In this room there were no protests or arguments beyond the surprised look from me. If tax people do not understand the system, how can we expect journalists or others to do so?
Continue reading “Moments of boredom at a tax conference?” →

I could not help thinking as I watched President Obama during the Newtown tragedy that he is not real. The touching of the eyes, the perfect cadence and pauses, the reflective moments … this guy is our best actor since Reagan. I suppose that is what is expected of basically a ribbon-cutting office, but our media does fawn over him.

Which of course makes me wonder about the office in general. What is he – our daddy? Why do we even care about his thoughts on anything outside of presidential actions? And even there our toady press follows his every word, deed and action. Real power lay elsewhere, and the job of the media is to deflect our attention from the actions of really powerful people. So he’s a nice magnet for that purpose.

But watching him during the tragedy gave me the creeps. This guy is too good, too smooth to be real.

It was a source of embarrassment for me to have fallen for the special pleading of Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann in their books concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Ultimate Sacrifice and Legacy of Secrecy. (The latter is merely a longer version of the former.) Both are now featured at our local used book store, donated.

All I can say in my defense is that they took me in a direction I wanted to go because

• 1) I do not idealize JFK. He appeared to me to be a mere cold warrior, an anti-Castro zealot. The idea that he was a humanist and idealist who wanted to avoid the Vietnam war presumes that he knew it was coming as it eventually played out. At that time, it was no more than one of many skirmishes. In addition, he was a schmuck who was highly abusive of Jackie, his boring high-society wife. She was unworthy of the public humiliation she had to endure as a result of his legendary dalliances.
• Further, 2) it explained why otherwise good people (Earl Warren and Arlen Specter, for example) actively engaged in a cover-up.

First, a word about both the JFK assassination and 9/11: Once an honest person looks at the evidence that contradicts the official stories, they become no-brainers. When I hear and read people, especially journalists, who cling tenaciously to the official dogma, I strain to understand such willful ignorance. This in large part explains why, in our culture, people are chastised and ridiculed for engaging in “conspiracy theory,” and why no discussion other than official truth is allowed on our airwaves. It’s merely a way to discourage self-consious people from exposing themselves to noise that drowns out official truth.
Continue reading “2013 will be the fiftieth anniversary of the great coverup” →

Some years ago – it’s been over a decade – I had gotten to know a young film student at MSU in Bozeman, Montana. I don’t know how this came about other than her being a barista at the coffee shop we frequented. We attended the showing of her film along with many others at graduation that year – she was part of a group, and I have no memory of their film. Later, and again I do not know how it came about, I passed along to her a copy of the original slave narrative from the University of North Carolina that was the basis for the Hollywood treatment of the incident called Amistad. (It got a royal Spielberging, which is why I am reluctant to sit through his rendition of Lincoln.)

This incident comes to mind because of another memory: while waiting for her to serve my coffee one morning, she told me about a film being made about the Ottoman treatment of Armenians, which she called the “first genocide of the twentieth century.” I responded that, as I recalled from my own reading, the first genocide of that century was in the Philippines, and was carried out by the United States. Her eyes flickered – and it is that flicker I remember so well. She was not stupid or shallow – far from it. The movement of the eyes was a reflex reference to her intellectual framework – she had quickly scanned her knowledge base and come up empty. My reference to a “genocide” carried out by the United States was outside her realm of the possible. No doubt within 30 seconds the conversation left her mind, never to return.
Continue reading “The eye-flick” →

As long as we are doing basic Newtonian physics here, there’s another aspect of 9/11 that violates his principles. The Pentagon was supposedly hit by an airliner that day, flown so close to ground level that it clipped light posts that were seen scattered about on the street and lawn.

Let’s do some basic math: The plane had just made an amazing maneuver prior to coming in, so let’s be charitable and say that it had slowed to a speed that the body of the plane could withstand at ground level, 300 mph. At that speed the object is moving at a rate of 440 feet per second. A football field is 120 yards long, including end-zones, or 360 feet. So imagine that you are sitting at ground level on the fifty yard line, and an object travels by … one-thousand-one – blink of an eye, it has traveled the length of the field and then some, hard to even see.

That is the speed of the plane as it hit the light posts. Newton’s third law* says that it does not matter what is in motion and what is stationary – the transfer of energy takes place and the object with the greater mass will prevail. In this case, it is either the aluminum wings of a jet airliner, so light that, as we have all seen, there are warnings painted on them telling maintenance staff not to walk on them, or the light posts. Those light posts are made of steel, I would guess a 1/4″ or 3/8″ hollow tube, and fastened in place usually by four very heavy bolts. The transfer of energy takes place, the light posts absorb some of it, but the wings take a beating, are probably sheared off, and end up somewhere on the lawn of the Pentagon.

But they are gone, nowhere to be seen. The official story says that the building absorbed them, that itself impossible, but second in line on that list.
Continue reading “Galileo in jail, Part II” →

We watched an interesting episode of NOVA last night, this one dealing with the history of the telescope. Current NOVA’s are hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, our modern-day Carl Sagan, or public interface with science. Sagan reminded us in his many writings that people have not gotten smarter over the centuries, but merely have better instruments available to observe natural phenomena. With better tools we make better observations.

Part of the episode was devoted to the tribulations of Galileo Galilei, the 17th century astronomer. He was found “vehemently suspect of heresy” in 1633, and put under house arrest with the understanding that he could be imprisoned or executed at any time. His crime, advocacy of heliocentrism, was really nothing more than subterfuge for enforcement of a larger regime, thought control, by the Catholic Church. The church was the predominant military and financial power center of that time. These were not stupid people, and church insiders were probably no less convinced than Galileo of the essential integrity of his work.

One talking head during the episode remarked that people were not “dumb” back then, the pretext being that we have advanced so much that incidents like the imprisonment of Galileo do not happen anymore. That is not true. Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact. We have not changed an iota.

I am not Galileo, and have no pretense or delusions about great intellectual abilities. My advantage over others is simply my situation in life – I cannot lose my job or pension, and don’t care (too much) about ridicule if I think I am right. The opinion of others is important to me, but my own personal integrity far more so. In fact, my internal constitution will not allow me to profess to believe things that I know are not true. Self-employment, or personal freedom, does that to a person.

As a person of average intellect but more than average freedom, I can easily see that 9/11 was an inside job. All I had to do was expose myself to the evidence. So too can many others, but in their positions will lose their jobs, their lives, fortunes and sacred honor if they go public. If nothing else, they will be ridiculed, and if a public person, marginalized. The United States security state is every bit as oppressive as the Catholic Church of the seventeenth century.

Below the fold is a YouTube. It a snippet from is what is called the “Hezarkhani video.” It was shown late on the evening of September 11, 2001 by CNN. It is fake. It took all day to put it together. Hezarkhani had his camera in place when bombs when off at a predetermined location on the tower, and the image of the plane flying through the building, absorbed as if into a sponge, was added later by technicians using software widely available at that time.

This is where mere bonehead science enters the discussion. What happens in the video cannot happen for real. The plane is made mostly of aluminum, and the wings are especially weak, like beer cans. The building is concrete and steel. It does not matter if a plane flying at 560 mph (itself impossible) hit the building, or the building hit the plane at that speed – the plane would be demolished and the streets below would be littered with wreckage, bodies, luggage and kerosene. The building would sustain slight damage, as it is designed like a spider web to spread the impact of such a force. People would have been hurt and killed, fire would have burned until available fuel was used up, and nothing further.

The Hezarkhani video is a jumping off place for anyone of a scientific bent with just a modicum of natural skepticism. Since what happens in that video violates Newton’s third law, then other videos, photos, and testimony of talking heads must also be false. And in fact, diligent investigators have combed through the lists of eyewitnesses to talk to people who actually saw a plane hit the building that day. Other than those connected to news networks or government agencies and paid actors featured prominently in on-the-street interviews that day, there was but one person. One.

Anyway, click below to watch the video, or not. I assume you won’t. I don’t need a lot of science to understand why not, either. I’ve been reading about this phenomenon for twenty years, writing about it for six. It is the effect of social forces on individual thought patterns and perceptions. We don’s see with our eyes alone. We are quite suggestible, and see with the whole of our minds, often overriding visual evidence provided by our sight mechanism. It’s a hard way to live, friend, much harder than openly describing what is seen. I don’t envy you.
Continue reading “Better equipment allows better knowledge, and deception” →

Craig, down below, offered insight on the inner workings of my mind regarding the presidential election:

… it’s the old “lips so no but the eyes say yes.” An accountant like Mark can do the math and see which candidate advances the bottom line of Mark’s agenda. He’s not stupid, just arrogant.

I’ve been somewhat troubled by the comment. First, as an accountant, I do not do math. I do arithmetic.

Secondly, when I think about the election outcome, I do get a fearful tinge when I think of a Romney victory. Craig’s got a point. But it’s an emotional response. Bush, after the stolen election in 2004, announced that he had “political capital” and immediately attacked Social Security. That was upsetting, but the attack failed*. Democrats rallied against him. Even Sen Max Baucus (D-MT) came to the program’s assistance. It was a situation where the institutional appearances overrode shared underlying goals. Democrats carefully gauged public opinion before responding. Seeing the attack would fail, they championed the program.
Continue reading “Obama Democrats: War hawks, tax cutters and terror monkeys” →